There are people whose faces and voices make indelible in
our minds the scenes, the places, and the times we’d see and hear them. For me, I remember afternoons in the art
studio, my mother working on some project, probably for a client in an oil
company office — oilmen loved paintings of wildcat oil rigs, and Mom probably
painted hundreds. There was light coming
from all directions, the ever-present smell of linseed oil and turpentine, and
from a portable GE television perched precariously on a folding chair, or some
such contraption, the sound of something benign and non-intruding, like
“Jeopardy” or the NBC game show that followed it — something that Mom could
occasionally bark the answers to. “Ming
Dynasty! . . . Henry the Sixth! . . . Boysenberries!”

I learned to tell time using the news. I knew the news was more important than
anything else, because Mom would only insist that I shut up when the news was
on — no other time. As a toddler, I
assumed that anything more important than myself must be of royal stature and
significance. So there was a special
meaning in my life to 11:55. It’s when
the game show would end and NBC’s afternoon news bulletin would begin. There, I’d see people important enough to pay
attention to, more than me. That’s the
time I was introduced to people like Nancy Dickerson, Robert Goralski, and
Edwin Newman.

Edwin Newman was everywhere, and yet it never seemed he got
enough credit for it. He was everyone’s
stand-in, the pinch-hitter, the man whose name followed the phrase, “Substituting
tonight is. . .” When Brinkley or
Huntley was off, it was Ed; if Hugh Downs was on vacation on Today, back in a time when no one would think of letting Barbara Walters take
the center chair, there would be Ed. He
had the simplest, most plain-spoken, most unassuming personality. He never embellished his sentences. He had a face more like a sandwich — soft
along the sides, meaty in the middle — and I probably began associating Ed with
sandwiches as an infant because his bulletin came on at about my lunchtime.

So I cannot think of his face or his voice, or his
presentation that was drained of all pretentiousness or illusions of majesty,
without remembering being happy. I’ve
always believed that I wanted to be a journalist, along with everything else I
wanted to be, because at an early age, I was shown by example that the news was
important above all — literally the only thing my mother would shut me up
for. It was the 1960s, when there were
four channels, color was something that merited its own fanfare, and news was
compressed into five or fifteen or twenty-five minutes of hush time. There was no time or space for levity or
banter or political diatribes. There was
a war on, and at a time when I drew everything I saw or mimicked everything I
heard, I’d fill pieces of paper with the images I collected from television:
dozens of NBC “snake” logos all in a row, and columns of numbers with labels I
could barely spell, and meanings I hadn’t yet gleaned: “Killed. . . Wounded. . . Missing.”

Later in my life, at the point where a boy decides to either
act like the person he wants to become or the person he wants others to think
he is, I chose the former. I reclaimed
my love for the English language, the tool that helped me resolve the inner
disputes one fosters when growing up among divorced parents. And it was at this time that the language
acquired a new champion, a familiar voice making the case for using this tool
as it was designed, not just however we please: Edwin Newman. Like my other hero at that time, James
Thurber, Ed had collected thousands of cases of words or phrases typically born
of the need to sound pretentious, but which had ironically become colloquial
and used by folks who had no idea of their true meaning.

Ed made a kind of cause
celebre out of the misuse of language, or often the use of it to make one
seem smarter by virtue of being misunderstood — for instance, using “cause celebre” when “campaign” would
suffice. In his two best-sellers of the
1970s, Strictly Speaking and A Civil Tongue, Ed compelled people to
listen more closely to what they said and why they said it, and to ask
themselves why they don’t take as good care of their language as they do their
automobile or their wardrobe or their children.

So it was that I took up the Edwin Newman banner, especially
after reading segments like this from Strictly
Speaking:

Can a phrase
be repealed? I have in mind Y’know. The prevalence of Y’know is one of the most
far-reaching and depressing developments of our time, disfiguring conversation
wherever you go. I attend meetings at
NBC and elsewhere in which people of high rank and station, with salaries to
match, say almost nothing else.

For a while I thought it clever to ask people who were
spattering with Y’knows why, if I knew, they were telling me? After having lunch alone with some
regularity, I dropped the question. In
Britain, a National Society for the Suppression of Y’know, Y’know, Y’know in
the Diction of Broadcasters was organized in 1969. It put out a list of the broadcasters who
were the worst offenders. Reporters then
interviewed the offenders and quoted all the Y’knows in their answers when they
were asked whether they really said Y’know that often. Nothing changed.

Once it takes its grip, Y’know is hard to throw off. Some people collapse into Y’know after giving
up trying to say what they mean. Others
scatter it broadside, these, I suspect, being for some reason embarrassed by a
silence of any duration during which they might be suspected of thinking about
what they were going to say next. It is
not uncommon to hear Y’know used a dozen times a minute.

There were some folks who accused Ed of being a snob or a
highbrow after his books were
released, but anyone who read them thoroughly learned that he never fought on
that false level. Indeed, he took folks
to task for exuding machinations that sounded like high English to the
untrained ear, but once examined with any critical eye whatsoever, revealed
their true identity: fancy ornaments for empty packages, like pinstripes on an
economy car. William F. Buckley, Jr. was
an occasional target. “Buckley does not
so much speak as exhale,” Ed wrote, “but he exhales polysyllabically, and the
results are remarkable. ‘Epiphenomenon,’
says Buckley, ‘epistemology, maieutic,’ and, so we are led to believe, people
swoon all over the nation.”

You can’t read Ed Newman without hearing that simple,
direct, unwavering delivery. His voice
was like the “tromboon,” that ridiculous hybrid instrument that Peter Schickele
created for concerts featuring his fictitious 18th century composer, P. D. Q.
Bach. He had absolutely no “gravitas,”
and there’s no doubt in my mind that, from his home in London where he spent
the remaining years of his life very privately, he winced every time he heard
that word. He probably took note of when
Katie Couric was hired at CBS, how folks asked whether she’d have the “Cronkite
gravitas;” then when the ratings didn’t improve, whether CBS had “lost its gravitas,”
or whether the network could find anyone who could restore it. I can see Ed devising a “Lost Gravitas”
poster to be tacked onto street poles: “Cute, fuzzy, adorable, answers to the
name of ‘Walter.’ Reward offered.”

I can imagine that Ed probably deplored the Internet, and
perhaps avoided reading it altogether. I’ve
written thousands of things called “articles” online over the years, though
upon imagining Ed reading one of them, I dread the thought of him dropping his
meaty jaw in disgust. “You wrote,
‘Inconceivably,’” I can picture him saying to me, “before describing a scene
that you most certainly would have had to conceive.” And for a man who drew his sword at every
Y’know, he would have directed cannons at LOL, IANAL, BRB (a derivative of the
TV phrase, “We’ll be right back,” which Ed had already called out as a lie,
noting people only said it before going away for quite some time) and a certain
target he had already set in his sights, “like.” I can only imagine the epic tome he would
have penned for “At the end of the day.”
If ever there were an obituary Ed Newman would have loved to write, it
would have been for that phrase.

Despite having famously interviewed Marshall McLuhan at
length, he refused to accept the moniker “media” as attributable to him. “My vendetta against the term media,” he
wrote in A Civil Tongue, “arises . .
. because it implies a go-between, one who takes orders and carries messages,
one who is employed by others for their purposes. There is no suggestion of the quality we need
most, which is independence. When I hear
somebody say media, I think of a phrase heard long ago from somebody whose
English was ungrammatical but eloquent:
‘I ain’ in dat.’ My difficulty
arises from the fact that so many people won’t believe that I ain’.”

It isn’t generally known how Edwin Newman spent his last
years, although we know he lived in London with his family, simply because he
loved London. I would hope he kept his
memory of his vendettas and his cause
celebres (perhaps I should tack on an accent
acute to the end of “celebrés” just to tease him), and that the images in
his mind were of the many places he’d seen and the people he’d come to love.

People tend to forget the stand-ins, the substitutes, the
supporting players, the sidekicks. We
make folks into stars and stars into heroes, often before dehumanizing them and
tearing down their images like fallen idols.
Sometimes I wonder whether the personalities behind those idols even
existed as people. Edwin Newman avoided that
entire morass, by being who he was — a man of integrity, clarity, and
straightforward honesty. On the day he
decided whether to become the man he might have wanted others to think he was,
or stay the true man of principle he always was, he chose the latter, for
whatever the cost. I hope he left this
world in a happy place.

Scott Fulton On Point

First there was the wheel, and you have to admit, the wheel was cool. After that, you had the boat and the hamburger, and technology was chugging right along with that whole evolution thing. Then there was the Web, and you had to wonder, after the wheel and the hamburger, how did things make such a sudden left turn and get so messed up so quickly? Displaying all the symptoms of having spent 35 years in the technology news business, Scott Fulton (often known as Scott M. Fulton, III, formerly known as D. F. Scott, sometimes known as that loud guy in the corner making the hand gestures) has taken it upon himself to move evolution back to a more sensible track. Stay in touch and see how far he gets.

Scott M. Fulton, III, is the author of this blog, and all text contained therein is his own unless otherwise noted explicitly. Some content may have appeared in other publications first, before being reprinted here, and is reprinted according to publishing agreements. Scott Fulton is always responsible for his own content.